Chapter 809 — The God Is Dead

The god is dead.

Gao Yang stared for a long while at that line carved into the stone, and because he did not know how to react, his face showed no ripple of emotion at all. Behind him, Yuri and the other two had drawn close as well, and those warped, dark-red incised marks came into every one of their eyes.

"...All the forebears of my clan..." Magnum's eyes went wide. "What is this supposed to mean?"

Gao Yang finally shook himself out of the initial shock. Though seeing such a blasphemous phrase at the temple gate had left him dazed for a moment, he still held fast to the rule that in Sandbox One nothing could be trusted and no conclusion could be drawn lightly; his first instinct now was to learn more from Selina. "Did the previous survey team not see this sentence in the ruins of the city?"

"No. Of that I am certain," Selina said at once. "The last team had not yet explored the interiors of the city's buildings, but they had already found the entrance to this temple. If they had truly seen this sentence, they could not possibly have failed to report it."

"The god is dead..." Yuri murmured. "During the last survey this sandbox world was already empty of all people. Who left this behind?"

"Think of the Phantom Town," Magnum muttered. "Empty of all people... maybe it is only that we cannot see them."

"We should search this temple. What do you think?" Selina said, turning her gaze to Gao Yang. Though she and the other two priests of the Order of the Dark Illusion were the "specialists" on Sandbox One, their concrete actions had to follow Gao Yang's judgment—after all, what they might face was possibly a god, and in that field the "Wanderer from Beyond" was the true expert.

Gao Yang knew well how the Sleepers regarded him, but in truth he did not consider himself a professional at fighting gods—that domain was, after all, far too lofty, and he truly could not imagine what sort of person could offer guidance on deicide. Yet he had, after all, brushed against no small number of divine secrets and had even taken part in the encirclement and culinary preparation of the God of Nature (the folk knockoff edition), so at least in the matter of self-confidence he was far ahead of ordinary men.

Of course, if one added the theoretical knowledge he had gained from his usual exchanges with Vero Dai and Kamael, plus the experience accumulated from his own study of ancient texts and the collections of the Order of the Radiant Stars, then in theology and the field of anti-divinity he could indeed count as an expert.

"Let us search the temple," he said with a nod. "A religious site is the 'channel' through which a god influences the mortal world; it can often, in reverse, reveal the nature and state of the god it corresponds to.

"But remember to stay on your guard. If you see anything strange or hear anything suspicious, speak up at once. In this place, do not trust your own mind too much."

The three priests of the Order of the Dark Illusion nodded, and then, together with Gao Yang, they set off toward the interior of the temple building, so steeped in the flavor of the desert.

No one knew how long the temple had lain abandoned; inside it seemed weathered and ancient, seamed everywhere with the marks of time.

Past a short corridor lay the hall used for religious rites. The lamps that had once lit the hall had long since gone out, and the great columns and the drapes hanging down from above wove layer upon layer of shadow through the chamber. Sunlight spilled in through the narrow high windows and cut bright "paths" between the shadows. It was afternoon in the sandbox world just then, and this slanting sunlight seemed none too strong, lending the whole interior an added air of mystery and antiquity.

Gao Yang turned his head for a look, and through the narrow high window he saw the sun at the edge of the sky. It too was a giant sun, and upon its brilliant corona faint grain-like patterns, like wood, could be glimpsed—it looked just the same as the "sun" of the real world.

Living on a moon that circled a gas giant, the Sleepers could not imagine what the suns of other planets looked like either, and within Sandbox One they had likewise set a sun no different from that of the real world.

"This place has been abandoned for at least several decades... perhaps a century, but no longer," Yuri said, bending down beside a collapsed stone platform, his fingers stroking a scrap of cloth that had fallen upon it, now severely weathered. "Otherwise these things could not have survived."

"But the words at the gate look as though they were carved only recently," Magnum muttered, frowning.

Watching Yuri's movements, Gao Yang asked casually, "Do things inside the sandbox world also weather and decay like those in the real world?"

"They do," Yuri said, straightening up. "And the forms and rates of weathering are much the same as in the real world. For these detailed parameters we referred directly to reality—rewriting an entire set of details would be a task almost impossible for mortals to complete."

"Ah," Gao Yang could not help shaking his head with a helpless sigh. "The real world can give birth to gods. How could a world so closely resembling the real world fail to give birth to similar religious phenomena?"

Selina, walking beside him, shook her head. "And before this, who knew that gods were 'born' rather than 'self-existent from eternity'?"

The three priests of the Order of the Radiant Stars had no answer and could only keep silent as they continued to examine the clues within the temple.

Magnum walked to the very front of the hall, where there was a special round high window; the light spilling down from it fell upon a platform that resembled a pulpit, and fine dust particles danced in the beam, their original trajectories disturbed by the uninvited guests who had come to this place.

Yuri came to Magnum's side and asked casually, "You are sure you have already removed the Mind Storm from your subconscious?"

"Damn it, how many times do you have to confirm it—of course I removed it!" Magnum glared. "Have I accidentally hit you with the Mind Storm that many times? Do you have to hold a grudge like this?"

"...I have even trained up a dedicated resistance to the Mind Storm. What do you think?"

"...I—have—removed it! Absolutely, removed!" Magnum stressed once more, a pause between each word, while still surveying the pulpit-like platform. Suddenly his roving gaze went still and settled on a corner of the floor. "...There is one here too."

Yuri followed the other's gaze and saw only a line of crude incisions cut deep into the flagstone, in handwriting exactly the same as that at the temple gate—

The god is dead.

The two priests of the Order of the Dark Illusion were silent for a moment, and then Magnum suddenly spoke. "Yuri, tell me the truth—do you believe what it says here?"

"There is only one 'god' in the sandbox. If this sentence is true, if the god really is dead, then we could go back and celebrate," Yuri said with a bitter smile. "Only, the contaminated are still contaminated, and the runaway sandbox shows not the slightest sign of recovering. Seeing 'the god is dead' here and now, I can only feel a doubled strangeness and dread."

Magnum nodded in agreement. "True enough. Whoever left these dreadful words here, his sanity looks far from normal..."

On the other side, Gao Yang and Selina were examining the several rooms connected to the hall.

In a display room located to the rear side of the pulpit, one that seemed set aside especially for keeping important objects, they saw many things offered up by the faithful, placed in square niches along the walls and carefully preserved.

Selina frowned slightly at the exquisite gold and silver vessels, the jewelry and ornaments. "An Upper Narrator, receiving the devout faith of the local people... these offerings must be only a small portion of it."